Dear LinkedIn: Do Relationships Matter?

Do Relationships Matter? Of course! I have been a LinkedIn fan since your inception, because I share your values (and slogan) that Relationships Matter. Your technology makes relationships easier to build, manage and identify. Over the past year or so, I have waited patiently for you to build on what is good and make it great, and, I know that I am not alone. What do I want?

–An API: We do not live in silos. We interact online on many networks in many ways. You have done a great job of getting us connected with our professional contacts, but we are unable to extend our relationships beyond LinkedIn without an API. Downloading a CSV file of contacts is clumsy and static. If you want us to rely on LinkedIn to aggregate contacts, we need tools to access them. As Chris Brogan remarked in June 2 in his post, Dear LinkedIn, Improve Please.

I want LinkedIn to improve its contact management. I have all kinds of contacts. I want to be able to slice and dice the information on-board. I don’t want to always have to export a CSV and then sort it myself.–Chris Brogan

-There’s Not an App for that: You built an IPhone App, a Palm Pre App, but no Blackberry App? Corporate types, the ones who you worked hard to win over, use Blackberrys. Even non-corporate types are Blackberry fans, too. A mobile version was a nice start, but Blackberry users need apps, too.

-Google: Like it or not, Google is a major part of your our arsenal of online tools – Gmail, Google Reader and Google Apps of all shapes and sizes. While you built a way to integrate LinkedIn in Outlook, it doesn’t help those of us who use are not Outlook users.

As you build your brand and grow your user base, new networks are emerging daily as are new tools to aggregate, share, feed and filter content and relationships across dozens of platforms. With the exception of a few new modules, we are are seeing essentially the same functionality on LinkedIn we saw a year ago.

Please, LinkedIn, give us a few more tools and become a game changer. You have an enormous user base and technology that cannot be found elsewhere. Trust that your users know how to manage their relationships outside of LinkedIn, and we’ll be back.